More, on government designed to fail ... by gimleteye

The excellent website by the Center for Responsive Politics, "Opensecrets.org", has a great new feature: The Top 10 Things Every Voter Should Know About Money-In-Politics". Here's one to warm the heart about the US Senate: "One anonymous senator, using arcane procedural rules, has put a hold on the requirement that senators also file by computer. So unlike everyone else, senators and Senate candidates file their reports on paper -- computer printouts, actually. The FEC then hires an outside contractor to re-type all those printouts back into the computer. The bottom line: during the busy fall campaign season, it typically takes about six weeks for the Senate's contribution data to reach the web where the public can see it. The cost to taxpayers for this re-typing of computer data is around $100,000 every election year."

Call it: government-designed-to-fail. Avoiding computer data sounds like a nefarious plot to thwart the public right-to-know. Maybe the anonymous senator took his cue from the National Rifle Association. Here's a tidbit from Fresh Air(NPR! Cut their funding!) and Terry Gross' interview with James Grimaldi on the influence of the NRA.

"GROSS: There are many reasons why it's difficult to trace where the American guns that end up in Mexico actually originated. One of the problems comes from the National Tracing Center itself, and this is the tracing center that handles what?

Mr. GRIMALDI: Hundreds of thousands, over the years, of traces.

GROSS: For the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Mr. GRIMALDI: Alcohol, tobacco and firearms.

GROSS: Okay, so what are the problems that the tracing center has?

Mr. GRIMALDI: The tracing center is required to follow laborious and very complicated regulations that have been put out over the years, largely put in place because of the Second Amendment and at the insistence of the National Rifle Association.

Essentially, the ATF cannot have a computerized database of people who own guns in the United States. The NRA opposes any registration, any registry of guns to be kept by the government. And as a result, the ATF essentially has to trace every gun in a crime gun trace by hand.

GROSS: So you're talking about literally paperwork.

Mr. GRIMALDI: It's literally paperwork or phone calls. There may be some computers that are involved, but there's a prohibition on, frankly, these computers communicating with each other and creating a national registration. That's been banned by federal law since 1978.

GROSS: Now, you actually went to the National Tracing Center, which not many people who aren't agents get to do. So tell us what you saw there.

Mr. GRIMALDI: Well, it's really an amazing place, maybe out of something like out of the movie "Brazil," where you could literally see boxes and boxes of documents that pile up at the tracing center, and the tracing center is trying to process them.

The reason they have these - so these are out-of-commission or out-of-business dealers, and when a dealer goes out of business, they need to keep these records of purchases so that they can search them by hand, and they ship them off to the National Tracing Center.

They can be, you know, written down in pencil and in ledger books. They could sometimes arrive waterlogged from hurricane damage or flood damage, which may have led to the store closing. It's really a bureaucratic mess that even friends of the NRA believe has put unusual restraints and difficulties on the ATF.

GROSS: And when was the law preventing a computer database put into place?

Mr. GRIMALDI: It goes back to the 1970s, after the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The Carter administration came in with a rule in which they proposed asking each of the gun dealers to keep an inventory of their guns so that they could facilitate these traces of guns used in crimes.

The NRA blocked that rule and put in place a prohibition, beginning in 1978, and in every appropriations bill since then, that restricts the ATF from creating a computerized registry of any sort or shape of gun ownership."

So here is an idea: write or call Senator Marco Rubio and Congressman David Rivera. Ask them to introduce legislation requiring computerization of ATF records of gun ownership to protect Americans. See how far you get in advocating right-to-know..